Rushdie fights Facebook Fatwah

Writer Salman Rushdie has managed to overturn a Fatwah which Facebook had declared against him. Rushdie hit Twitter upset that Ayatollah Zuckerberg had deactivated his account, demanded proof of identity and then pronounced that he was now called “Ahmed Rushdie”.

Rushdie never uses his first name, Ahmed, he pointed out; the world knows him as Salman and that was what the Iranians stuck on his death warrant. In one post he wanted to know where Zuckerberg was hiding and demanded he give him back his name. The Twitterverse took up his cause and within two hours, Rushdie gleefully declared that Facebook had buckled and he was Salman Rushdie again. “I feel SO much better. An identity crisis at my age is no fun," he twittered. Whose business is it - and what for?

Facebook is not really good at dealing with people with real name complications. Wael Ghonim, the celebrated Egyptian blogger, used a fake name to set up a popular anti-Mubarak Facebook page. That led Facebook briefly to shut its Arabic version in the middle of the Tahrir Square demonstrations, until a woman in the United States agreed to take over as administrator under her real name.

Facebook would not explain to Associated Press why it tried to do what the Iranian Revolutionary Government could not manage. It sheepishly admitted that there had been some mistake and it was sorry for the inconvenience this caused him.